This is an online journal of our education journey. We like to read living books, do lapbooks, projects, and unit studies. We go on educational trips and get together with other families for different clubs.

Friday, 18 November 2016

This week's Unit Study Roundup theme is Penguins. I decided to share a collection of videos on penguins.

This is a really good documentary that we watched on TV. It's called Spy in the Huddle and a research documentary team made penguin that had a spy cam inside of it.and so it gives viewers a penguin's eye view of life in the huddle of a penguin. I hope that you enjoy watching Penguins- Spy in the Huddle This is the full length show. It is nearly 50 minutes long.

And of course no collection of penguin videos would be complete without including a link to my favourite penguin, Pingu! Follow this link to go to Pingu's official YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/pingu

In French they say, "Un tiens vaut mieux que deux que tu l'auras." and this literally translates to: one that you hold is better than two that you will have.

In Spanish they say: Más vale pájaro en mano que ciento volando - which literally translates to A bird in hand is worth more than 100 flying.

The Dutch saying is: Een vogel in de hand dan tien in de bush

What is your favourite bird? I used to have a pet budgerigar (a budgie) and she was so tame. She did not speak though because only the males speak. I was so disappointed when I found that out. I learned this AFTER I had her home. We loved her so much. She had free run of our apartment until we got a cat. Then, she had to stay in the bathroom with the door closed for her own safety. I only put her in her cage at night during the day she could go where she wanted.

A bird is a nice easy pet to look after. I put newspaper in the bottom of her cage and had to change that weekly (as well as disinfect the cage bottom). I fed her bird seed and made sure she had fresh water in the cage. I also hand fed her lettuce leaves and other carrot shavings/peelings. I would clean and peel the carrot and then use the carrot peeler to peel some more carrot off and I gave her those to eat.

This is an interesting proverb or pearl of wisdom. Next week the theme will be mountains, and I will explore some other proverbs and what they mean. There might even be a craft for you to make with your child.

Take a look at the other links from the other bloggers in the Unit Study Roundup.

Friday, 28 October 2016

This week's Unit Study Roundup topic is winter holidays. I decided to share a little bit about my favourite holidays. I used to celebrate several holidays with my eldest DD so that we both learned about different cultures and customs.

The first holiday that we would celebrate was Hanukkah. It is a fun celebration which is the Jewish festival of lights. We lived in a town where there was a pottery place. We painted our own menorah together. She painted one side and I painted the other.

Here is our Menorah with all of the candles alight. This was on the final night of Hanukkah.

Hanukkah celebrates the miracle of oil in the temple. The short version of the story is that there was enough oil left to light the lamp for one day. A miracle happened and the oil lasted for eight days. Now, if you look at the picture above, you will see nine candles. Look carefully at the menorah, do you notice anything? One of the candles is slightly higher. This candle is the shammus candle or the servant candle. Each night, you light this candle and say some blessings. On the first night you say all three blessings and on the other nights you say the first two blessings.

1. Blessed are You, Lord our G‑d, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us to kindle the Chanukah light.

2. Blessed are You, Lord our G‑d, King of the universe, who performed miracles for our forefathers in those days, at this time.

3. Blessed are You, Lord our G‑d, King of the universe, who has granted us life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this occasion.

One candle is added to the menorah each night. The first night, you light only the shammus (the one at a different height) and one Chanukkah candle. By the eighth night, you light all of the candles. Candles should be added to the menorah from right to left (like Hebrew writing).

For more information please go Chabad.org. I used to make Latkes. Here is a recipe similar to what I used to make, I got it from Epicurious

INGREDIENTS

1 pound potatoes

1/2 cup finely chopped onion

1 large egg, lightly beaten

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 to 3/4 cup olive oil

Accompaniments: sour cream and applesauce

PREPARATION

Preheat oven to 250°F.

Peel potatoes and coarsely grate by hand, transferring to a large bowl of cold water as grated. Soak potatoes 1 to 2 minutes after last batch is added to water, then drain well in a colander.

Spread grated potatoes and onion on a kitchen towel and roll up jelly-roll style. Twist towel tightly to wring out as much liquid as possible. Transfer potato mixture to a bowl and stir in egg and salt.

Heat 1/4 cup oil in a 12-inch nonstick skillet over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking. Working in batches of 4 latkes, spoon 2 tablespoons potato mixture per latke into skillet, spreading into 3-inch rounds with a fork. Reduce heat to moderate and cook until undersides are browned, about 5 minutes. Turn latkes over and cook until undersides are browned, about 5 minutes more. Transfer to paper towels to drain and season with salt. Add more oil to skillet as needed. Keep latkes warm on a wire rack set in a shallow baking pan in oven.

Traditionally foods that use or are made in oil are served for Hanukkah treats because of the miracle of the oil.

Christmas is of course another favourite winter holiday of mine. Everyone is either really grumpy, or really cheerful or somewhere in between! If you are a musician, Christmas is a really busy time of the year because you are either playing at concerts or playing carols in the shopping centres!

There are as many different Christmas traditions as there are people who celebrate Christmas. One of my favourite things to do is relax. Our family has a quiet day. We celebrate Christmas over the evening of the 24th and of course during the day on the 25th. The big thing is that the Christkind (Christ child) brings the presents and we open them after dinner (evening meal) on the 24th. The Christkind brings the gifts in the German speaking world rather than Santa Claus because Santa Claus - St Nikolaus has already visited on the 6th of December! On the first Sunday of advent, the children leave their letters for the Christkind on the window ledge and St Nikolaus takes the letter on the 6th of December.

On the 25th, while everyone else around us is having their Christmas, we are enjoying a quiet day and we have the big Christmas meal. Each year it is always a different special meal but there are two things that are the same, Blaukraut and Kartoffleknödel. Blaukraut is cooked red cabbage and Kartoffelknödel are potato dumplings.

On Christmas Eve in the Church of England, there is a special service which is called a Christingle service. You can make your own Christingle at home very easily. You need an orange, some red tape, some toothpicks (or cocktail sticks), some candies and dried fruit, some tinfoil, and a candle. You need to cut the orange at the top and then put the tinfoil inside that hole. The candle goes in there. You put the red tape around the middle of the orange. Place four toothpicks around the orange and then put the candies on the toothpicks (just two or three tiny candies per toothpick). After you have made your Christingle, you light the candle and can sing some of your favourite carols.

What is a Christingle and what does it represent? What does it look like?

Here is a picture:

The orange represents the world or earth, the red tape represents the love or blood of Christ and it is placed around the centre of the world or earth - this is of course the equator. The toothpicks represent the four poles or four corners of the world, north, east, south, and west. The candies and dried fruit represent all of God’s creations The lit candle represents Jesus’s light in the world, bringing hope to people living in darkness.

In the church service, we hear the story of the birth of Jesus and the prophecies. We sing some carols and then we go forward and collect our Christingles. We return to our seats and then one person lights their Christingle from the Pascal (Easter) candle and then they pass the light on to other Christingles. Eventually each person is holding a lit Christingle and we sing Silent Night. It is a lovely service and churches are usually packed full. There is also midnight mass and so one year I went to midnight mass. The service was done without artificial light and we had communion at the end. I had never been to midnight mass and wanted to go at least once because I had heard about it on television shows.

Kwanaza is something that I taught my daughter about but it is not something we celebrate or observe. I heard about it and researched it. I read about it here. I think it is a nice celebration. It goes from December 26th to January 1st. There are seven core principles of Kwanzaa - one for each day.

The principles are:

Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.

Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): To define and name ourselves, as well as to create and speak for ourselves.

Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility): To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers' and sisters' problems our problems and to solve them together.

Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together.

Nia (Purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.

Kuumba (Creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.

Imani (Faith): To believe with all our hearts in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

Here is a nice photo of a Kwanzaa candle holder - and I linked to it from here:

I think those are some nice principles to celebrate and live by.

New Year's Eve is another favourite celebration and in our family, we like to watch Dinner For One - this sketch is about 11 minutes long and it is about a lady 'Miss Sophie' who is celebrating her birthday. Her butler James is serving her and her guests. Every year on her birthday, she had four friends who would join her. They had a three course meal - soup, main dish, and dessert and each course has an alcoholic beverage to accompany it.

Unfortunately, Miss Sophie's friends have since passed on and so James, the butler, has to act like her friends. For every course he asks her if it's 'the same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie' and she always replies with 'It's the same procedure as every year, James!' This sketch is a cult classic in Germany on 'Silvester' aka New Year's Eve. I hope that you enjoy it.

Please click on the other links to see what the other bloggers in the Unit Study Roundup have posted about:

Friday, 21 October 2016

This week's theme for the Unit Study Roundup is Winter, Ice and Snow. I decided to do a little experiment with my daughter. I had visions of making cups of ice for this experiment but alas I had a a wonderfully full ice box and couldn't so I had to make do with ice hearts.

We decided to try the experiment with three ice hearts. We used about one half of a teaspoon of sugar and salt to try this out.

My daughter put the salt on and I put the sugar on and the third ice heart we decided to see what would happen with nothing and just using the air temperature of the room.

We periodically checked the time and wanted to see which worked the best for melting the ice. We hypothesised that the salt would work to melt the ice the fastest and the sugar would be second and air temperature would take the longest.

This is what we saw after five minutes:

Air temperature on the left, the top ice heart has sugar on it and the bottom right has salt on it.

The salt had eaten through the ice five minutes in.

After approximately 50 minutes, the salt ice heart was completely melted and the sugar was very nearly melted and the air temperature still had a way to go. I put them in medal formation! The salt is in the first place spot, the sugar in the second place spot and the air temperature is in the third place spot.

What is the Science behind this? Water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius or 32 degrees Fahrenheit. When you add sugar or salt to the water, you change the equilibrium of the water molecules and that means that it now needs to be at a lower temperature to freeze. Instead of melting at 0 degrees Celsius or 32 degrees Fahrenheit it might need to be at -5 degrees Celsius or 23 degrees Fahrenheit. Because the salt melted the water the fastest, that means the salt water needs an even lower temperature to freeze.

We went back to check on the ice hearts and after one hour or 60 minutes, the sugar had completely melted the ice and there was still a tiny bit of ice left to melt from the ice heart that had nothing added to it. 70 minutes after the start of our experiment, and the remaining ice heart still had a tiny piece of ice left to melt. After 75 minutes all of the ice hearts had melted.

Ta da! The final product - water!

Don't forget to read what the other bloggers have been writing about for this week's topic!

Friday, 14 October 2016

This week, the theme for the Unit Study Roundup is Soup. Today I am going to share my favourite recipe for soup. It is for Cream of Broccoli Soup. I use the method of this recipe as a base and change the vegetables that I use.

Melt the butter in a large saucepan, add onions and stir over medium heat for about 3 minutes. or until onions are soft. Stir in flour, stir over medium heat for 1 minute. Gradually stir in the water, Vecon (vegetable stock cube), broccoli, tomato, thyme, rosemary, nutmeg, and lemon juice, bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, simmer for about 15 minutes or until broccoli is tender. Blend mixture in several batches until smooth, add milk and yogurt, return to saucepan, reheat without boiling. This serves 6.

Please have a read of the other blog posts on soup for this week's Unit Study Roundup:

Friday, 30 September 2016

I grew up in Canada and our Thanksgiving Day is in October. It is the second Monday in October which coincides with Columbus Day in America. We had our Thanksgiving meal on the Sunday and it was not too different to our Christmas meal.

I grew up on a farm and so pretty much everything was from the farm. We had a farm-raised chicken for Thanksgiving dinner, potatoes, carrots, turnip, squash, and dressing.

Dressing is basically mashed potato with some chopped onion, bread crumbs, egg, salt, pepper, and poultry seasoning. You mix all of this together and then put the mixture into a casserole dish and bake it until there is a nice crust on the top (about 15 - 20 minutes at 350 F or 180 C). The amount of seasonings will of course be to taste.

I can't tell you what the exact proportions are because it was always made to fit the casserole dish.

Here are the posts from the other bloggers in the Unit Study Roundup, please do read them:

Friday, 23 September 2016

This week's Unit Study Roundup is on Fall or Autumn. We did an experiment on leaves today. We decided to see what colours are in leaves. There are three pigments that colour leaves, Chlorophyll - which is green, Carotenoid - which is yellow, orange, and brown, and finally Anthocyanin which is red.

We took leaves from two trees and a hedge and we tore them up into small pieces. We did each type of leaf separately to avoid cross contamination. I put three glass jars on my table, along with the leaves, rubbing alcohol, and a coffee filter.

Each type of leaf went into a separate glass jar and then DD poured the rubbing alcohol into the jar to cover the leaves. She did not like the smell of it!

We covered the jars and left the leaves to soak. According to the experiment method that I had we needed to leave the leaves soaking in the rubbing (isopropyl) alcohol for about an hour.

We waited... and we waited... and we waited... and we played... and we played... and we waited some more.

The next step of the experiment involved cutting up a coffee filter into strips and then dipping the coffee filter into the leaf and isopropyl alcohol mixture and waiting some more. The idea is that the coffee filter is supposed to take on the colour of the mixture and as the alcohol evaporates, the colour will travel up the coffee filter. I needed to use bigger jars for this and therefore had to pour one of the mixtures into a new jar!

We need to wait for another hour or possibly and hour and a half because the isopropyl alcohol has to travel up the filter and evaporate and we should see a pigment on the filter.

After nearly two hours of waiting, we still saw no pigment in the filter. I did some searching around and fount another method of this experiment which uses energy and the alcohol. I went and got one more leaf off of the tree. We ripped it into small pieces and then poured the rubbing alcohol on it. We mashed the leaf pieces into the rubbing alcohol with a spoon. Then we put the lid on the jar and put the jar into a little tub of water that had been boiled in the kettle. The energy is the heat from the hot water.

After nearly an hour of soaking and a water change, here is how dark the rubbing alcohol is:

We let it soak for another hour and then we put in the coffee filter strips. I decided to try leaving the jar in hot water to see if that helped to speed up the process.

This photo was taken about an hour or two after putting the strips in - you can see that there is some colour in the strips now. The first round of this experiment left me with wet white coffee filter strips.This photo was taken the next day, and it is the pigment we managed to extract from the maple leaf.

Hop on along to the other blogs in this Unit Study Roundup and see what contributions the other bloggers have made to this :-)

Friday, 16 September 2016

This week's theme for Unit Study Roundup is Halloween. I thought that it would be nice to put together a collection of recipes that you could use for your party. I did a search and found some nice recipes that I would like to try from All ReciplesHere is a fun take on Devilled Eggs. It's called Halloween Eye of Newt.

Ingredients

12 eggs

1 tablespoon sweet pickle relish

1 tablespoon mayonnaise

1 pinch celery salt

1 tablespoon prepared yellow mustard

2 drops green food coloring, or as needed

1 (6 ounce) can sliced black olives, drained

Directions

Place all of the eggs into a large pot so they can rest on the bottom in a single layer. Fill with just enough cold water to cover the eggs. Bring to a boil, then cover, remove from the heat and let stand for about 15 minutes. Rinse under cold water or add some ice to the water and let the eggs cool completely. Peel and slice in half lengthwise.

Remove the yolks from the eggs and place them in a bowl. Mix in the relish, mayonnaise, celery salt, mustard, and food coloring. Spoon this filling into the egg whites and place them on a serving tray. Round the top of the filling using the spoon. Place an olive slice on each yolk to create the center of the eye. Dab a tiny bit of mayonnaise in the center of the olive as a finishing touch. This will be ready in about 25 minutes!

This looks like a good dip and it looks nice and simple too, provided you can find canned pumpkin:

Easy Pumpkin Dip

Ingredients

3/4 cup low-fat cream cheese

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

1/2 cup canned pumpkin

2 teaspoons maple syrup

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Directions

Beat cream cheese, brown sugar, and canned pumpkin together with an electric mixer on medium speed in a bowl until light and creamy, 3 to 5 minutes. Add maple syrup and cinnamon and beat until smooth, 1 to 2 minutes. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Bloody Fingers

Ingredients

2 cups creamy peanut butter

2 cups powdered milk

2 cups honey

1 (15 ounce) package pretzel rods

2 tablespoons sliced almonds, or as needed

1/4 cup plum jam, or as needed

Directions

Mix peanut butter, powdered milk, and honey together in a bowl until mixture resembles a soft dough. This will be the 'flesh' of the fingers.

Mold enough dough around each pretzel rod, making sure to cover the ends. The pretzels will be the 'bones' of the fingers.

Use the tip of a teaspoon the make marks on the 'flesh' similar to knuckles.

Push 1 sliced almond onto 1 end of each 'finger' to resemble a finger nail.

Place jam in a microwave-safe bowl and heat in microwave until softened, 20 to 30 seconds. Dip the end opposite the 'finger nail' into the jam for the 'blood'.

Dragon Eggs

Ingredients

6 eggs

1/4 cup soy sauce

2 tablespoons molasses

2 teaspoons salt

8 tea bags

Filling:

1/3 cup mayonnaise

2 tablespoons minced red bell pepper

salt and ground black pepper to taste

1 cup salsa

Directions

Place eggs in a saucepan and cover with water. Bring to a boil, remove from heat, and let eggs stand in hot water for 15 minutes. Drain hot water and fill saucepan with cold water; allow eggs to sit until cooled, 15 to 20 minutes. Drain water. Gently tap or roll eggs on the counter so the shell is cracked but still intact.

Return eggs to saucepan and pour in enough water to cover eggs; add soy sauce, molasses, salt, and tea bags. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer until eggs have absorbed color, about 30 minutes. Remove saucepan from heat and leave eggs in water to cool to room temperature.

Peel eggs and trim bottom of each egg so it will stand upright. Cut each egg lengthwise and scoop yolks into a bowl. Mix mayonnaise, red bell pepper, salt, and pepper into egg yolks until evenly combined.

Spoon yolk mixture back into egg whites; smooth filling to be level with egg white. Put each egg back together.

Friday, 9 September 2016

This week's Unit Study Roundup topic is a choice of three topics, Apples, Pumpkins, and Harvest. I decided to do another word search with Harvest themed words because we like those in our household. Here is this week's offering for you. I hope that you and your child(ren) enjoy this word search. I have included the copyright information in the footer both where I made the puzzle and found the image that I used. Have fun!